It is my experience in studying our historical and quasi-historical legends, and in the best of all ways, namely by going over the actual ground where they are alleged to have happened, that wherever you are on sure ground there is a remarkable appropriateness between the episodes and the incidents of the tales and their topographical setting. The story told whether actual happenings or a conflation of legends, or a conscious invention, suits the geography and the terrain.
–Henry Morris, First Battle of Magh Tuiredh, JRSAI, 1928.
The purpose of this book is to provide a guide to readers who would like to become familiar with those places associated with early Irish history and mythology. In Ireland, the link between place and myth is strong. The hundreds of dolmens and ring forts associated with the love story of Diarmuid and Gráinne, for example, keep this medieval tale alive, just as ‘The Cave of the Otherworld’ near Tulsk in Co. Roscommon connects us to the earliest rites of samain, a festival that is still with us in the shape of Hallowe’en; or there is Glenasmole on the borders of Dublin and Wicklow, where Oisín, the son of Finn mac Cumhail, fell from his horse on his return from Tír na nÓg, having set out 300 years previously from Glenbeigh Strand in Co. Kerry.
Like most mythologies, Irish mythology has a mythos or a sacred narrative and a religio, that which binds members by vows and rules. In the Irish context, the mythos is the strongest component and the religio is the weakest. This means that pre-Christian Ireland did not have a religion as such, but this apparent absence of structure does not mean that there were no beliefs of a spiritual nature. The island receives its name from Ériu, a goddess whose name has been translated to mean ‘regular traveller of the heavens’. Generally, the Irish for Ireland is Éire, and this is the version that you will find on government papers and on all postage stamps. However, most goddesses are to be found in threes, and Ériu shares a triad with Banba and Fódla; Banba represents the warrior aspect of Ireland, while Fódla represents Ireland in the poetic or spiritual sense, and Ériu is the mother goddess who nurtures the island.
The coming of Christianity in the mid-fifth century brought an end to many ancient rites and the mythology surrounding them. Some ancient ceremonies, however, managed to survive quite late, such as those surrounding the inauguration of a king, and many of the stories from prehistory were preserved in manuscripts written by monks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The fruit of their work can be seen today in such works as the Book of Leinster, a wide-ranging compilation containing Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions’) and the Táin Bó Cuailigne (‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’), or the Book of the Dun Cow (Lebor na hUidre), which also contains a version of the Táin as well as many other stories about the central character of Irish myth, Cú Chulainn. Mention must also be made of two later sources: the Annals of the Four Masters, a chronicle with entries stretching back to the Deluge (calculated as 2,242 years after creation) written in the seventeenth century and based on previous annals, and the great seminal work by Geoffrey Keating from the same century, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, which retold many of the ancient tales in establishing an approach to Irish history from a native point of view as a counter-balance against Tudor propaganda.
Many of the stories find their genesis during the Iron Age, a time when ash, elm, and oak began to appear in greater numbers. Grass and bracken also increased, as did cereals. Around the Late Iron Age, agriculture was renewed. The Bronze Age artefacts resulting from the copper mines of west Cork, which influenced the Bronze Age throughout Europe, began to be replaced by Iron Age implements, which influenced agriculture and supplied the weaponry which led to the expansion of tribes or clans. This also led to a greater number of tribes seeking territorial expansion throughout the island, and, in prehistory as in history, the dominant tribes and their gods and goddesses took priority in the sagas and legends. The iron fork and the iron axe represent the beginning of expanding agriculture, the depletion of the woods and the onset of the warrior bands which were to become the stuff of sagas and contain the heart-blood of mythic ritual. The Iron Age proper began around 800 BC in Upper Austria with a culture known as the Hallstatt, and the Iron Age culture which influenced Ireland came from Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland and is known as La Tène. For centuries the La Tène Celts were the dominant people in Europe. The distinctive craft of La Tène culture can be seen in metal, gold and stone artefacts. An example of the latter is represented in the curvilinear artwork on the Turoe Stone which stands in Co. Galway.
It was this period that saw the emergence of enclosed farmsteads in the form of raths or ring forts, also known as lis or liss or lios, which have left a lasting mark on the Irish landscape and have contributed to the names of many places. Despite many being ploughed over or destroyed, an estimated 30,000 still survive throughout the island. They generally have a diameter between 80 and 170 feet; a single bank with a circular ditch is the most usual form. It was under the roofs of these primitive residences that the tales of gods, goddesses, heroes and the Otherworld were first formed, building up to a corpus of myth that, despite all the losses, is still impressive.
A conventional approach is to see these stories as divided into four broad cycles:
• the Mythological Cycle, containing stories about the various peoples that arrived in migratory invasions and is especially concerned with the god-like race of the Tuatha Dé Danann;
• the Ulster Cycle, which recounts sagas about the heroes of the Ulaid, a tribe inhabiting the north-eastern part of the country, including parts of modern north Leinster;
• the Fenian Cycle, a corpus of prose and verse mainly about the exploits of Finn mac Cumhail and his band of warriors, the Fianna.
• the Historical Cycle, containing accounts of both legendary and historical kings such as Cormac mac Airt, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and Brian Bóruma, but most important of all the tale of Buile Shuibhne (‘The Frenzy of Sweeney’).
Of these, it is the Ulster and Fenian cycles that have caught the imagination of writers through the centuries. As in all mythologies, the role of the hero is central. In the Irish pantheon, the most important is Cú Chulainn, the Iron Age hero defending Ulster from the forces of Connacht who was eventually transformed into the spirit of Irish resistance to English rule. He is the main focus of the Ulster Cycle sagas, which also include the great romantic tale of Deirdre and Naoise and ‘The Taking of the Hostel of the Two Reds’ (Togail Bruidne Da Derga). The tales from the Ulster Cycle are based between the forts of Emain Macha, two miles west of the city of Armagh, and Dún Dealgan, less than a mile west from the town of Dundalk. They tell the tales of the last years of the Picts, or Dál nAraide, before they were subsumed into the Gaelic order under the O’Neills in the fourth century.
The Fenian or Ossianic Cycle is set in the reign of Cormac mac Airt, who is said to have reigned in Tara in the third century of the Christian era. From the thirteenth century these tales were translated from the manuscripts and slowly entered our culture through the work of poets and bards, and in time, from the written word evolved from the oral tradition. Many of these works are contained in works known as the Duanaire Finn or the ‘Lays of Finn’, many of which were written or rewritten in the early seventeenth century and translated into English in the late nineteenth century.
Not all mythological tales fall into any of these categories. There are, for example, those stories of adventure classified under the heading of imram, from the Old Irish for ‘rowing about’ or ‘voyaging’. The most famous of these is Imram Brain, or ‘The Voyage of Bran’, telling of a voyage to the Otherworld, which was reached after the voyagers fell over the horizon. This saga is found in the eleventh century manuscript Lebor na hUidre, but according to the noted German scholar Kuno Meyer, it was probably written in the seventh or eighth century. A sixth-century imram concerns St Brendan from Brandon Creek in present-day Co. Kerry, who did not fall off the edge of the world but instead discovered America. In the late twentieth century, an expedition using a boat similar to Brendan’s successfully made it to America and back.
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